TREY RACKED HIS BRAIN ON HOW TO DIAL BACK SWISHY’S VIOLENCE.
The stabbing fury wasn’t befitting his scarecrow friend. As the wrathravens encircled the boys with dark walls, their foggy bodies indistinguishable from one another, Trey noticed that Swishy was caught in their violent rhythm.
Corruption flowed through the scarecrow’s arms in dark fires, flames alight throughout patches of straw. Ironically, this toxic darkness only served to make Swishy attack the wrathravens with more tenacity. He wanted to hurt them. He did hurt them, but it was affecting him too. This wasn’t sustainable in the slightest.
Trey held onto Swishy’s wrist, firmly resisting the stabs, the twists, the overflowing malignancy.
But the scarecrow was strong in his aggression. His feet were planted onto the tree branch, balanced and immovable, almost embedded, as he stood there like a stabbing turret.
Trey’s thoughts turned to the [Straw Guardian] down below. He could feel its continued growth. A childish part of him wanted it to come up there and save Swishy from himself. Swishy was always providing a guardianship to others but he’d never not needing that benefit for himself. Now, especially.
Stab, stab, stab.
The neo-ravens cried and squawked—something Trey wanted—just not at the expense of a cursed Swishy.
Meanwhile, the Bristles’ encouragements were occurring with much more clarity. The rain of body parts intensified as Bristles fed off the energy of his straw god’s tenacity.
Skies cleared from the destroyed wrathraven’s above. The gold began to swirl through the patches of dispersed darkness. Less wrathravens meant clearer skies. The golden-yellow atmosphere became visible once again. The lustrous patterns flowed overhead like creamy latte art.
Everything was rich and beautiful. And murderous. But the beauty canceled it out—mostly.
Trey knew what he and Swishy were fighting for, what the pair was working toward. But with the renewed visibility came a proper view of what Bristles was up to.
The [Nevermore] had given Bristles more strength in his transformation. The claw hand had grown even larger. While Bristles’ human arm was visible, the wrathraven talon had spread over it with its purplish aura. The energy had a life of its own. Trey could almost swear that he saw tiny wings flickering from the edges of Bristles’ arm as if the limb was possessed and soaring independently.
Soaring through the guts of the neo-ravens at least.
A part of Trey—one that he didn’t believe to be his—startled from watching it. An enigma that wasn’t his. A sudden presence that flared then disappeared before he could inspect it any further.
What was that? Trey said, shivering in his ghostly form. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hot. And it wasn’t his. It just rattled inside, rippling alongside his essence. The unsettled feeling stayed on the forefront of his attention as Bristles spoke—something about the man was triggering this.
The explosion was coming. And it’d happen inwardly. Trey only hoped that it wouldn’t tear a hole in him, soulfully or otherwise.
But back to the present moment, the blaring madness that screamed villainously.
“Souls, souls! So many souls!” With each kill Bristles achieved, the destroyed body sloughed away while the orb of the corrupted soul remained. The human soul was a powerful thing. Exposed and left to itself, the natural aura of humanity cleansed itself of the wrathraven gloom. The shadowy and purplish flakes lifted off the spirit like a tangerine peel, returning the original blue coloration. Trey heard the souls breathing, catching their breath in the wake of its prior containment—suffocation even. The human was itself again—though without a body, of course.
They were upset, though, still sour from their defeat at the hands of the maniac invader who now tore through their nests.
I hate you! How dare you? You were one of us!
“I’m the original. You were never one of ME! Now silence!” Bristles flexed his claw open. And the souls vibrated and lost their shape. They shook so hard, becoming Cearthquakes from the inside. The more they rumbled, the less integrity they maintained along their borders. Bristles was tearing them down before he rebuilt them in a form he preferred: birdcages, of course.
No! Stop that! Let us go! Free us! We’d rather die than become part of you!
“You’ll die on my terms!”
The souls were reconstructed into birdcages. Then they were shrunk to the size of keychain tokens. The cages floated into the massive Nevermore claw and swirled around its aura, orbiting slowly before Bristles’ greedy eyes. One of them affixed to one of the talons like a ring. Another one connected to the pinky—which then became enlarged. Bristles stretched his fingers out and admired his new pinky ring. The jewelry gleamed in all the spectrum of colors that these souls came in. There were wrathraven purples, there were blackwheat reds, there were the cyan blues of default humanity, and there was darkness.
The remaining cages were stored within the Nevermore’s chest and wings, enlarging them.
“Come, Lord Swish! Join me in destruction!”
Trey wasn’t sure if Swishy heard him or otherwise registered the provocation.
Swishy just kept stabbing the wrathravens. His arms blackened. His rake swelled with darkness.
Trey gripped Swishy’s arms harder. “Come back, you’re not too far gone, just ease your way back.” The voltage kept pumping. The light was sparking away the shadows. If Trey were to believe his eyes, he knew he was reducing the curses by a meaningful amount. But when Swishy drew his arm back and then plunged into the wrathravens—taking Trey’s arms with it—the feedback of the impact slammed against his psyche.
It was all too personal for him.
“Get a grip, Swishy. Uuuh, not the stab grip. You know what I mean. Let’s elevate the right way, yeah?”
Because the [Straw Guardian] was still growing. The elevation was from the darkness, though. That was the thing with Swishy—and the thing with the wheat he grew too—that they fed off any energy that he took in. Swishy hadn’t quite mastered the art of not being a sponge. The absorption made him the most flexible and powerful asset of Swishy’s but now it was working against him.
That’s what made the boy so human when Trey really thought about it. Survival tactics engrained itself into the core of your being. The hardest thing there was to not become the thing that took you through hell to the other side.
Swishy was going dark. The dark plunges were working, after all. Trey was appalled when he felt the boy’s hands twist with each impaling. He was turning the barbarism up. The flowing darkness turned into familiar words. GLOOM and DEMISE swam along the scarecrow’s arms, starting a forest fire through his ecosystem of self. And these two words were facts of life. Swishy went through the motions of corruption, one with the worst parts of existence.
The guardian kept growing. Trey feared it’d become possessed soon enough. He could feel the network of curses surging through the straw. The buzzing tension of gold-straw and the curses that now sought them out was felt below Trey through the tail end of his ghostliness.
The young man sought out a solution, something to make Swishy dial the harm back.
[Zpread]. Trey’s hands faded away first, releasing the rake, allowing Swishy to dig the prongs into the neo-ravens at his discretion.
Trey was becoming atoms again. The smaller he became, the stronger the crush of the overflowing darkness took on him. He related to Swishy and his Goldie forms at this moment. It was hard to control the atoms. He strained against the draw of the dark winds. Suddenly, the neo-raven body parts were concentrated on Trey. That’s how it felt to him at least. The predator senses were new to these transformed humans but sensing weakness, directing murderous attention to those who were weaker, was something that came innately to humans in the first place.
Trey accepted the draw of the beasts. His atoms were pulled away from the natural shape of his soul. He kept track of his energy, primed to react to the first hint of a corruption attack.
The blackness flared, gathering toward the spots where the Trey particles were drifted.
And Trey let his charged particles rip.
[Zzt] crackled through the dark wall, exploding with bolts. After the first wave of electricity, a static pulse kept popping the body parts, causing the wrathravens to flinch. Trey was pleased at the discovery of pain, at learning that the neo-ravens couldn’t handle to amount of damage that real birds were used to taking. No human was used to the amount of pain that a beast often suffered. Even wrathravens were prone to battle, to hunting, to their own victimization in a world that feared them.
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The voltage cracked through Swishy as well. Some of his straw burnt from Trey’s attack. Small fires—of the standard red-orange variety—ignited upon his hands. The scarecrow released the rake, leaving it stuck into a nearby wrathraven, and patted the flames out. His body language was panicky, urgent. He’d never been on fire before. He was shocked and confused.
And Trey was thankful for this. His clumsy boy was back. “You good now or are you still trying to be a little serial killer?”
“I’m good, just cooked a little bit. Thank you, Trey!” Swishy grabbed his rake and yanked it out of the beasts he’d left it in.
A groan squeezed out of the impaled creature as its vaporizing death came into effect.
All around, the darkness was filled with golden static. Trey had turned the lights on. And with that Trey, undid his [Zpread], taking his atoms back while the darkness was licking its wounds and took moments to heal. His blue ghost was back to normal form—but not normal state. He felt a buzzing feeling as if he’d consumed too much caffeine. Some aspect of himself wasn’t all the way right.
“Are you okay?” Swishy asked.
“I don’t know. Something is off with me.”
“I see that…” Swishy stared intently, reading the soulscape to make a diagnosis.
Trey waited with stiffness. Nervousness was unavoidable. The next seconds were like lead weights.
Swishy shook his head. “It’s my fault, I think. The corruption spread through the guardian. I let it get too close to you.”
Trey closed his eyes and concentrated. He focused on the link between him and his scarecrow’d body. He sensed that the straw cast had gained a degree of blackwheat, covering the feet, perhaps even crawling up to the shins.
“It’s not your fault. That’s just the battle we’re in. Let’s keep going.”
“Yeah, okay. But sorry anyway.”
“No apologies.”
“I got it.”
“We got it.”
Swishy nodded.
They fist-bumped—spaced perfectly so that Trey’s ghostliness didn’t phase through Swishy’s hammy little knuckle.
Gold light shined upon them. Ironically, Bristles had cleared the skies above.
“This disappoints me,” Bristles huffed. “But I suppose this is Lord Swishy’s natural state. He shall embrace the darkness soon enough. I have no doubt. My faith is limitless. Although these thoughts are not a matter of faith. I am a wrathraven. I knoweth what resides in the skies above. We shall ascend to the true beasts, the original flock that I once runneth with—and the atmosphere beyond these golds will be darker than black. Thou wouldst think we were in space.”
There it was again: a frightened presence within Trey’s phantom awareness. The nauseating feelings couldn’t be located at all. But the correlation to wrathravens, to Bristles, worsened its condition.
Maybe it’s the corruption…I don’t know.
Trey had to manage himself. As a soul, he was in the same position as Swishy always was: vulnerable to manifested gloom. He settled for his tried-and-true solution, something that’d worked for him since entering the city.
“Lemme get a bite,” Trey said to Swishy.
“Sure.” Swishy held out his arm.
Trey made the conscious decision to not make any jokes about turning him into bread, about cooking him into a fine grain rice or a pumpkin pie. “Thanks,” was all he said.
“Anytime!”
Trey almost wanted to scold him about that ‘anytime’. Swishy shouldn’t just offer himself as food, even Trey, but that would be a later conversation.
Even as a ghost, Trey was sure he could interact with the physical world. He’d used enough electric magic in his soul form to know that he could achieve friction if he set his mind to it. Ghosts moved things all the time, at least in people’s stories about shifting furniture or stalking gazes from the portraiture. He shifted his atoms to the tips of his fingers as if he were using a bolt spell. While he couldn’t feel the heat, he concentrated on the idea of heat, of rapid-rapid friction.
He reached to Swishy and pinched at the offered forearm, then plucked at a straw-chew. To his surprise—and triumph—it came loose. Heck yeah! And then he placed it into his mouth, gathering energy now around his lips and teeth, making himself as solid as he could. A haunting ghost…Let me do all that haunting type shit…
Trey released the strand into his mouth and achieved another small success: it didn’t fall through him. The Clayborne held the straw in his mouth and chewed upon it, slowly, deliberately, making a constant effort to moderate the tangibility of his otherwise ethereal self.
“That’s a cool trick!” Swishy gawked at Trey, impressed with the soulscape gymnastics.
“I had to do something. Bristles makes me nervous…”
“Me too.”
“And if I don’t make it back to my body, I can still behave like one!” It was a joke. But once it escaped his lips, the comedy turned tragic real quickly in his mind.
Swishy’s face soured too but he offered quick comfort. “You’ll make it back. With this ‘body’ and your other one. There are two Treys now!”
“I like that idea. I’ll double-team the enemy.”
“Yeah!”
Bristles stared down from above, a dark god in all that luster. What frightened Trey was there were even more wrathravens in the next level of altitude, the real ones.
In the present moment, Trey nibbled on the straw chew and watched the spectacle up above. Trey’s soul was calm. His boundaries were the cleanest edges, composed and neat like the line-up at the end of his haircut. But that other aspect that occupied him was in disarray. That unseen, unidentified pressure welled up like the soda pop carbonation.
Then Bristles flew upward, taking his soulcages with him. Their insides whimpered but the fast ascension stole their words, breaking their voices down within the distortion of his wind.
Another Bristles monologue, and another moment where his soul was in a normal enough state but his unseen passenger carried the worst anxiety he’d ever been privy to. It was so uncomfortable to remain with these horrible feelings. And the separate concern was that the worries were a phantom that he didn’t know how to encounter. He didn’t know whether to greet it or find a method to exorcise it. He knew, though, that he had a resource for such a thing. The expert was right beside him, carrying entities within his wing, his straw, perhaps even his psyche.
“Swishy, I think I have a passenger.”
“A passenger?”
“Not in but near my soul. Or next to it. Call it a neighbor.”
“Is it a neighbor or a passenger? And also I don’t see anybody.”
“When do any of these things exist in plain sight.”
“I see…I don’t but I think I see…you have a spirit thingy happening huh?”
“A spirit thingy is the most clear and elementary way to put that. Yeah, bro, what do I do with it?”
“Say hi, maybe? Wave…just soulfully.” Swishy gave a meek smile but Trey could tell that he kind of meant it.
“I’ll try.”
“Wait, are those your b—?”
Interruption—the neo-ravens were back, reinforcing black walls all around their sky-high branch.
Say Hi to HELL! The wrathravens were unamused. They’d recovered from the Swishy attack spree as the boys gave them a precious moment of breathing room. They backed away and undid their room of darkness. Trey could see the world again. There were the promising gold skies. There were treetops. There was evidence of them still elevating upon the [Straw Guardian]. Swishy was bent to one knee and was feeding his colossus energy.
They rose upon the growing guardian and the human wrathravens followed them upward. They backed away and layered their numbers. Each of the beasts had different zones that they were occupying. The ones in the back rows were charging up Black Blasts while the frontrunners were stretching their body parts into beak shots and talon stabs.
Trey spread an array of [Zzt] around him and Swishy, creating a light bubble that diffused the attacks. Even though the assault was physical, he’d seen the amorphous construction of the beasts—their solid attacks were powerful but the integrity of their bodies was still fog at its base. The light didn’t hurt them but still proved to weaken them.
The creatures caught on and then disappeared from Trey’s view, continuing to gather behind him.
Swishy, however, was apparently ditching him. From the corner of Trey’s eye, he watched the scarecrow spread into a “T” and swan dive off the branch.
“Where’re you going?”
“I’m getting our ride!”
“I thought you couldn’t grow the guardian anymore!”
“I have an i—” But the distance already ate his Swish-speak.
Meanwhile Trey the blackness cleared in front of him as the neo-ravens were staunch about their strategy to blindside him. He turned and turned and turned, but only caught a glimpse of their rapid movement. He already couldn’t wait for Swishy’s return. Down below he sensed that Swishy landed down by the guardian, bringing it upward. They knew he was only a human. Their wings were always going to be faster than Trey’s moderate ghost drift. Levitation was no match for flight.
Soon the attacks started up—Trey caught a talon to his soulful shoulder blade. He didn’t go “ow” like he would in his body. Instead of nerves, his harms were now spiritual and emotional. He felt bad. He felt panic. When the talon retracted from his ghost, it’d left the poison of its intent behind, a tiny fine print word of doom for Trey to contend with.
FRAILTY—this time both his soul and his hidden ‘passenger’ felt it. That was their “hi”. Briefly, the spirits inside grazed one another.
The desperation of the neo-ravens went on, which actually increased their composure and decision-making.
Through the gaps of the frontline flock, the back layers shot their Black Blasts and Wing Blades—a bait. Once Trey dodged the projectiles, the closer flock members were focused on tracing his movements, ready to pounce at his evasive maneuver.
Trey erected the volt barrier again. He used so much soul for it, his ghostliness shrinking.
“Ah…” Trey looked around at the soulful mist lifting from his arms. The side-effect of diminished stature was back, something he last experienced during his fight against Bristles. He was losing soul and gaining diminutiveness.
His shrinkage happened in real time as his eye-level descended while gazing around at the gliding enemies. The beasts were much bigger in scale than even seconds ago. Their reddened eyes swallowed Trey, knowing the feel of cornered prey.
Then they launched their attacks.
As Trey expected: first the projectiles, a blade and blast barrage that he slipped through. The video game bullet hell was no joke but he’d escaped unscathed. He twisted away from a too-close blade—only for a claw to appear at his side. Up close, the reach was tremendous, the claw larger than his body. He evaded successfully.
But was snatched by another one. His ghostliness wouldn’t phase through. Darkness could touch him, this he knew, and his captor now dragged him into the sky amongst the other flockmates. Branches and brush past him by in a dreadful blur.
Do something, do something fast…
You’re ours! The beasts said.
“Swishy, hurry it up! Please?”
There was no Swish-ing, though, as far down as he was.
He felt new letters occupy his bodies. Eight black letters, a second-grader word that’d he come to hate since his arrival to the domain. B-I-R-D-C-A-G-E spread through his collarbones and arms and hands.
Trey knew a mutation was coming.
And the passenger within did too.